Timeline — ChangeLog
A record of how the Crossfire Development Timeline was built, in the order it happened. Each pass below added sources, entries or capabilities — and several of them corrected earlier passes. The milestone count is given at the end of every stage so the growth is traceable. For where the material came from and what it proved, see the research notes.
Build log
Pass 1Initial build — 120 milestones
Timeline generated from the 1992–96 mailing list archives, 55 release announcement pages and the commit history of eight repositories. Six eras established: Origins at Oslo, The Wedel Years, The 1.x Line, Trunk and Consolidation, Quiet Years and Revival, The Git Era. Filter by era, category, free text and a major-only toggle. Delivered as a dark, self-contained page.
Pass 2The Usenet origin, and five community projects — 126
The 4 May 1992 post "Co-developers for X-Windows game wanted" was supplied, moving the timeline's start back four months. Added the Crossfire Atlas, Spell Shuffle branch, retro image set, ElvenLands map set and the web client. First figures: the Usenet screenshot, the web client UI, and a base64 retro-vs-current tile comparison.
Pass 3–5Screenshots, and a client release recovered — 137
Gridarta, DockWindow, JXClient and GTK-v2 screenshots added, which required a stacked multi-figure mode for the JXClient 64px/32px comparison and the GTK-v2 Glade layout pair. Mining the 29-year news archive produced nine entries invisible in any commit history — Bugzilla, the 2003 forum and wiki, Con of the North, the recovered 1995–96 announcements, and the 1.12.0 client with its Windows port, which corrected an entry claiming nothing ever shipped as 1.12. Flathub packaging added.
Pass 6–7Community infrastructure dates — 145
Launch dates supplied for the current forum and wiki, Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon and Bluesky. These corrected an entry that had implied the 2003 forum and wiki were the ones still running; both were replaced in 2008. Discord dated from the website repository, IRC bounded from a pre-Freenode network reference. Year-level date precision added so period entries stop displaying a placeholder day they cannot support.
Pass 8IRC founding date — a correction
The channel's real founding date, 13 August 2003, replaced an inferred c. 2001. The inference had been drawn from a "(formerly Open Project Network)" note on the site's IRC page and was simply wrong — that remark describes the network's history, not the channel's age. The bad reasoning had propagated into three entries; all were rewritten. The real date turned out to be better: it puts the channel ten weeks after the forum and wiki, making the summer of 2003 a single deliberate move off mailing-list-only communication.
Pass 9–10Site template integration, then redesign
The timeline was rebuilt inside the site's Dreamweaver template: CSS into the css
editable region, data and renderer into the head region, content into the TextArea region. All
classes namespaced tl- to avoid colliding with the site's own .date,
.heading and .intro rules, the renderer rewritten in ES5 for the
template's environment, and the entire dark palette dropped in favour of the site greens.
Entries were then redesigned from hairline-separated rows into discrete cards on a shared rail, with markers, a date badge and per-era entry counts that update live with the filters.
Pass 11Release tarballs opened — 146
The CHANGES files that every 1990s announcement pointed at were streamed out of 50
server archives. Yielded the 1994 fork reunification, the Berkeley contributions and runes, the
random map generator, the dragon race, and three map regions that shipped with no mention in any
release note — Pup Land among them, a 54% jump in the map archive described in the
announcement as "no real notable change worth mentioning".
Pass 12–13Announce archive scanned, then applied — 153
The crossfire-announce mailing list, 34 periods from June 2000 to August 2025, was read in full. It corrected 13 release dates — the timeline had been using repository release-preparation commits, but the announcement send time is the actual release — and revealed four client releases the page was missing, ending with 1.75.5 in August 2025. Also added the original metaserver, the 1.9.0 maps packaging error, and the classic image set.
Pass 14Contributor identified
A name supplied for an initials-only art credit resolved into the project's most prolific
contributor of 2001. Confirmed against a DEVELOPERS file deleted in 2014 and recovered
from git history, which tied three separate identities — dnh,
darth_bob, David Hurst — to one person, and connected the 2001 classic image set
to the 2020 retro set that still draws on it.
Pass 15Live page promoted
The template version became index.html. The dark standalone was preserved rather
than overwritten — it is both a distinct deliverable and the authoring source the rebuild
extracts from — and now lives at index-dark.html.
Pass 16Two more Usenet posts — 155, and a dead link fixed
v0.8 (29 June 1992) dated Crossfire's move to its permanent Oslo FTP home and proved the mailing list already existed three months before its own archive begins. A 25 September 1992 reply gave Johansen's statement of design intent, including the data-file architecture described months before it existed.
The same pass corrected a source link this timeline had introduced: the 1992 post URL had been
transcribed from a screenshot with a lowercase l where a capital I
belonged, and had been dead since it was added.
Pass 17Companion pages
research.html documenting sources, findings, corrections and known limitations; this changelog; and screenshots wired into the two 1992 Usenet entries.
Growth
| Pass | Added | Milestones |
|---|---|---|
| 1 — initial build | Six eras, filtering, dark standalone | 120 |
| 2 — Usenet origin, five projects | +6 | 126 |
| 3–5 — screenshots, news archive, Flathub | +11 | 137 |
| 6–7 — forum, wiki, social, IRC, Discord | +8 | 145 |
| 11 — release tarballs | +1 and six entries rewritten | 146 |
| 12–14 — announce archive, classic set | +7 | 153 |
| 16 — v0.8 and the design-intent post | +2 | 155 |
Capabilities added along the way
- Figures — single screenshots with captions, and a stacked multi-figure mode for comparisons that are unreadable side by side.
- Inline tile comparison — 24×24 and 32×32 archetype art embedded as base64 and pixel-doubled, so the retro image set's premise is visible rather than described.
- Year-level precision — period entries render as a bare year instead of claiming a placeholder day.
- Per-era counts — live with the filters, so "major only" shows where the weight of the project's history actually sits.
- Reproducible build — the site page is regenerated from a pristine template and the authoring source every time, so repeated passes cannot damage the template markers.
Files
| File | Role |
|---|---|
| index.html | The live timeline, inside the site template |
| index-dark.html | Dark self-contained version; the authoring source the rebuild reads |
| research.html | Sources, findings, corrections, limitations |
| changelog.html | This page |
images/ | 11 screenshots: two 1992 Usenet posts, Gridarta, JXClient ×2, GTK-v2 ×3, DockWindow, web client |
Compiled August 2026.
